[SGVLUG] eth1394: my nemesis

[Dustin]

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, Jeff Carlson wrote:

> Dustin wrote:
> > Just out of curiosity, does *anyone* use ethernet-over-firewire, or was it
> > only written to annoy me?
> 
> Just you.  I haven't heard of it before.

That's the annoying part.  Nobody apparently has, except for me.  Perhaps 
it hid the bodies of its other victims.

> ...Is this a continuation of some 
> epic that happened prior to me getting on this list, or did I miss a 
> message?

Hmm, I can't remember what I said about it when, but as far as I can
tell eth1394 was written and put in the kernel solely to keep me from
running Gentoo.  It must have been very important to someone to go to all 
that trouble....

When I installed Gentoo on my desktop, I bashed my head against the wall
for quite a while because the network simply could not come up. After
sacrificing a few goats I finally discovered that the Gentoo installer CD
insisted on loading eth1394, which is an ethernet-over-firewire driver.  
Surely an unlikely thing for an installer to need, but sure enough it
guaranteed that the real ethernet couldn't come up.  Nobody else seems to
have this problem, so I assumed it was some very mobo-specific bug in the
hardware detection.  I also have no idea how I figured it out--there are
generally lots of loaded drivers in a generic distro kernel I know nothing
about.  I was probably desperate enough to resort to random rmmods hoping 
something would work.

Now it's a year later, I've almost repressed my memories of the suffering
and eth1394, and I am installing Gentoo on a laptop--different CPU
architecture and manufacturer, obviously different chipsets, everything.  
*No* *reason* to expect the same problem.  The only things the same are a
board with ethernet, ieee1394...and Gentoo.  The install CD had no
problems with the network, lulling me into a false sense of safety.  But,
when I rebooted into the new system, the network didn't come up.  Whoops,
it's a bare system I was going to net-install everything else on. After
more skull-pounding action, on a whim I looked through the loaded 
modules, and one looked strangely familiar.

Guess what module it was?

I've never heard of anyone using the stupid thing, but still I appear to 
be condemned to blacklist the module in every Gentoo system I install from 
now until doomsday.

At least the fix is simple--I'm writing this on the laptop to celebrate
getting X configured.

Dustin